Taking this egalitarian principle one step further, classes will be project-based and students will be judged on individual learning over the course of the project.

How students of different abilities will be assessed has not yet been conclusively determined, Evans says.

Students at CCSC will also be required to complete a 100-hour internship in their junior or senior years, an ambitious program that would be impossible at a larger school with more scheduling restrictions, according to CCSC associate principal Emma Stellman, also a former CRLS faculty member.

But the personal attention of CCSC comes at a price.

“One of the challenges of a small school is you give up the multitude of [academic] options a large school has,” Stellman says.

“We’re not going to have the myriad clubs and sports teams,” Evans adds. “If you’re headed to the NBA, you might not want to come [to CCSC].”

This admitted shortcoming is one of the central issues behind the official opposition to the charter school.

In a letter sent to thousands of families in January, the Cambridge school district touted CRLS’s facilities and extracurricular activities, contrasting them with what they considered to be CCSC’s vague and smaller-scale promises.

“Small charter schools find it nearly impossible to offer the same depth and breadth of course selections,” the letter read.

The letter also alleged that CCSC had approached Harvard and MIT seeking an educational partnership, only to be rebuffed.

But Evans disputes this claim, saying, “We never asked for the University’s endorsement, nor would we expect it.”

Mary H. Power, Harvard’s senior director for community relations, acknowledges that the University has communicated with CCSC. However, she characterizes the talks as “information-sharing,” rather than containing any concrete proposals.

“We were interested in hearing, and [CCSC] was interested in talking,” Power said.

But the CCSC charter specifically anticipated a relationship with Harvard, based around the College Opportunity And Career Help program (COACH), a mentor program run through the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) to prepare high school students for college.

Larsen Professor of Public Policy Christopher Avery, who founded COACH, says the program would not even consider working with CCSC until the school expands to accept high school juniors and seniors.